The PPP and PNC have done worse for us, while doing very well for themselves

Dear Editor,

What I share today is not intended as a comment on dual citizenship, which is farthest from my mind. It is of what I stand for and where I am, as one holding citizenship of both Guyana and America. I speak in the straightest terms on how I view the personally challenging circumstances of America and Guyana, and as they have featured and continue to feature prominently in my life.

I love many things about America, beginning with the sum of what it has made possible for me. There is powerful recognition of the ideals and ingenuity behind the American idea, American vision, American character and will, of the stirring realities that they concretized both inside America and globally. For those components, and in respect of those quality features, I am as American as anyone else, bare none. I am proud about that, pleased that there is such a grove, such a grand calling put into living practice, when at its ennobling best. I have been with that for a considerable period; one that is cherished for the lessons learned and the insights gained. In two words, those are the positives.

Then there is the other side of America, the dark untouched upon side of its long, sometimes toxic, underbelly that it also taught me, revealed to me, and which left horrified in the understanding. Two other words sum such up: the negatives. Both positives and negatives have their value for me, both have enlightened further. Enlightened that even in the best that is around, there can be so much of the other side, the twilight times and midnight horrors that bring so much personal recoiling.

More have become obvious more recently: some of the history, the truths about colour and outsiders, the priorities of its economic system, the thrusts of its strategies, the nuanced and rank objectives of its visions. Despite all of this, when I look around, America is still the best for me, and by many a long mile, as hard as they have been.

Again, I like America, even love America. But I like it and love it like a treasured stepmother. But I cannot pretend stupidity, stand by silently, applaud treacherously, when my biological mother is being trampled upon, insulted outrageously, palpably violated. I cannot stand idly and cheerfully by, while America kicks this place and its peoples around, and then uses both as a cheap doormat. For oil. For Venezuela. For economics. For reengineering and controlling this mother of mine for its own purposes, some not so beneficial to our welfare.

There are many Guyanese, who are comfortable doing so, through fawning over the soon to balloon American presences, as they turn their backs on their roots and rupture once deep navel strings. I cannot. I do not even want to try.

I cannot love America my stepmother (good to me), as much as I love Guyana, my own mother, despite her being so poor to me. I can only do so and be so because I love Guyana so much, warts and deformities and all, of which there are many.

I perceive that America has complete control now of Guyana and our future; that is a little too rich for me. Its agents have been strongly facilitated, through what I strongly believe is present PPP government and PNC-led coalition opposition in its machinations and calculations. The local crop of politicians has joined forces to sell outright our birthrights. It is not just for the biblical pot of pottage, not even some sinister pieces of silver. The PPP government and PNC-led opposition have done worse for us, while doing very well for themselves. They have sold the promise for pittances coming to us, while fooling us with endless pufferies. Both sets of leaders have converted the promising national bank into the trickiest of sleazy pawnshops to satisfy their own criminal ambitions. They have succeeded with the help of America to cheat us out of motherhood, motherland, and the inheritances of this land. And that I cannot stand for from either of them, and all of these three forces combined and arrayed against the interests of all of us Guyanese.

Yours truly,
GHK